The Call is Coming from Inside the Gormenghast

by: Isla Lader

‘Gormenghast? Like Goncharov?’

I have heard this joke four times now from my partner.

One of the properties in the joke above is a real novel about fictional events, and the other is a non-existent film about potentially real events. If you’ve spent a decent amount of time on social media sites in the last few months, then you have almost certainly encountered the Russian mob film not actually directed by Martin Scorscese. In fact, it’s not filmed at all. The widespread popular joke would go as far as to actually be shown to Martin Scorscese, who played along happily. Its actual origin is apparently from a knock-off shoe.

But I doubt you have encountered the existent novel about the fictional, isolated, Gothic castle — Gormenghast.

There is a profound irony and hilarity here, something altogether surreal, but very in character for the Gormenghast Trilogy and its almost non-existent relationship to a popular culture scene. Mervyn Peake’s 1950s fantasy series includes: Titus Groan, Gormenghast, and Titus Alone. The first two novels follow the eccentric figures of a spatially hostile castle as the kitchen boy, Steerpike, tries to mount the throne of Gormenghast; the third follows heir, Titus Groan, in a world outside of his castle Gormenghast, anachronistic and uncertain.

At the core of the confusing scenes and dream-like dialogue is a very real claustrophobia in the text and delivery. There are myriad conclusions to be pulled from the work, but the one that has resonated the most with me is this desperate clawing and clinging to escape from the confines of the castle versus the desperation of characters to make the castle see reason or love, protect, and give to them that which they deem to believe they deserve. If I were listing the characters of this work, then the castle would be one of them.

Gormenghast, that is, the main massing of the original stone, taken by itself would have displayed a certain ponderous architectural quality were it possible to have ignored the circumfusion of those mean dwellings that swarmed like an epidemic around its outer walls.

I am grateful that the terms ‘liminal’ and ‘liminality’ are derivatives of the concept of ‘limen’: the thresholds of perception and the barely perceptible. Labyrinths, crumbling houses, the stores in the mall that are only open during Halloween, and the drawer you shove rubber bands and plastic sandwich bags that you are too guilty to throw away.

Those concepts feel applicable to the existence of Peake’s trilogy (which apparently was meant to be more than a trilogy).

Gormenghast at times feels specifically made for me, six other people, and Neil Gaiman (who allegedly was attempting to make a television adaption of the series). I have to believe that it was made for Mervyn Peake, the author who wishes to be the audience, as well.

There is something I admire about the anonymity of the text, the small comforts of having never encountered another’s opinions of this work until I started reading it myself, alongside the removal of a demand to consume it in any fashion other than my own. It reminds me almost of my childhood and the accidental stumbling upon good fiction, like entering a deep tomb or thinking you heard someone call your name while you were walking down a busy street.

The tragedy of The Gormenghast Trilogy is not its liminal. The tragedy of Peake’s work is that it is technically unfinished. We call this collection of novels, The Gormenghast Trilogy because the bookend comfort and the idea of a trio, with a beginning, middle, and end, is less depressing than the reality that a life moves in shapes and ways that are antithesis to the formulas that build the walls of stories and narrative.

Further textual complexities surround the novels including: the third book in its early publication having re-writes that Peake never approved of, a fourth dubiously canon text written by Peake’s wife and then found only very recently by the Peake family and published in 2009, a play written by Peake that is perhaps the prototype for the series as a whole, and the beautiful illustrations Peake composed alongside the writings.

While main characters, Fuchsia Groan (the princess of Gormenghast) and Steerpike (antihero and antagonist of the first two books) were killed at the end of Gormenghast as a means of ensuring Titus Groan (titular character) could have the proper motivation to escape the castle, there remains a wound of something unsaid with these novels. In Neil Gaiman’s analysis of Mervyn Peake’s notes and manuscripts, allegedly Peake wrote that Titus was destined for a laundry list of encounters and adventures, some of which included mendicants and lagoons. There is not a thoughtful silence at the conclusion of the text, nor a transition into another space, instead there is a sort of wretched cutting off at the limb of it.

Thus, I am haunted. Gormenghast has haunted me. Oops, all haunted. The call is coming from inside the castle.

As a longtime fan of transformative fiction, I immediately considered the merits of writing the conclusions to these novels myself.

The works have allegedly entered the British public domain and I am an obsessive individual.

But immediately I was stopped by my own obsessions with attempting to write in emulation of another author. I just cannot get the nose right. I know many of my peers are masters at ensuring the death of the author and then hiding the body, but I often live in the shadows of the original author’s prose and can feel them breathing against my ear.

So I looked to see what I could deduce from the wound of the text and the manuscript. In my brainstorming I stumbled across the 2000’s BBC serial television adaptation.

I do not like it at all.

But it was the catalyst for this project and this adventure I am about to embark on; the only way I can finish Gormenghast is if I adapt it into another medium.

In a way, the conversion with the text I had was one where I interpreted the necessity of escape from castle Gormenghast. Peake makes it clear that the castle cannot be redeemed and efforts to do so are ones of failure. Titus does escape from the castle, and in a way he has also escaped from the text.

His antagonist and opposite, Steerpike, alongside his sister and friend, Fuchsia were not so lucky. Despite both of them being primary characters of the text, their meta roles were to be the stones Titus used to climb to shore and the reinforcement of his necessity to leave Gormenghast.

The focus then would have to be Steerpike and Fuchsia, as their stories had ended when Titus really had no more need for them. I believe adaptations should be made with the intent to touch on what is already beloved in a work and then add to the dialogue of its existence and I felt that their conclusions had missing emotional beats.

The idea for a Choose Your Own Adventure online, written in open source Twine code, came from scholar Bo Ruberg’s analysis and interviews in their publication, The Queer Games Avant-Garde How LGBTQ Game Makers Are Reimagining the Medium of Video Games. The intersection with storytelling and identity was still with me after encountering the scholarship.

I am not a coder. My understanding of both the language and the act is limited. For this very reason, I find there is a bit of magic to the act. The miasma of the skill and the art is the kind that I can plagiarize off of for stories and my more flexible magic systems in fictions.

And maybe that is why I feel an adaptation of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast Trilogy would be best done in Twine, an open source code for the genre of digital choose your own adventures. There is something strange about the text, in the same way the skill of coding is a foray into the new for me.

Gormenghast is an interlude, a liminal place, and therefore it is best described on the threshold of things, like the backends of a computer and a text.